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Electron trouble


vasubandu

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Man, have I got myself into a mess, and I don't know that way out.  I have a speaker wire that runs through a conduit in my wall.  But it is too short.  So I took another wire and connected to the end.  Seemed easy enough, but now I have electron problems.  Seems that they don't like coming to the end of a wire and leaping for the other side but not knowing if they will make it.  So now I have electrons piling up at the end of the wire and refusing the jump.  I told them that they would be fine and that the wires are twisted together, but they say that to an electron, they seem miles apart. I told them that the new wire was 10 gauge, not 12, thinking that might entice them, but they said they did not care if it was silver.  

 

So I checked in with the wires, and things just got worse.  I told them that they needed to be closer together so the electrons would jump, and this wire started telling me just he close he was getting to the other and how they were "merging," and he was just way out of line.  But he offered to try, and when I braided some of the wires together, a few of the electrons seemed emboldened, but I am not sure if it made a difference.  And the wires started getting nasty, so I turned off the power.  That shut them up.  But I still have electrons that won't make the leap, or at least I think I do.

 

So the question is whether I am crazy?  Does joining 2 speaker wires together affect performance?  If so, would't wall plates do the same thing?  

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More connections can equate to more trouble it not connected properly and/otr became corroded over time.
ANY connection whether it be splice or wall plate are subject to above limitation.

Many year, ongoing argument mechanical splice  vs solder for wire to wire conductor.

If speaking speaker wire to speaker wire my opinion is 1) best is one contiguous run 2) a properly joined mechanical (twist) and soldered.

 

Real life: wall plate to a good termination and plug in. Plugs and jacks can be replaced / re-newed

or use wireless wire

 

remember that there are the speaker output connections and speaker input connections......bare wire to terminal by tightening a clamp, bare wire to spade (crimped or soldered), bare wire to some sort on banana plug connection and then the 'friction' connection employed by each type.

they b all good if properly done and remain free of oxidation and are mechanically sound (tight)

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You must have spoiled your electrons, hate when that happens. 

 

I have had the same problem with a wire being a little shorter than expected. I just added another piece, soldered it together, a little tape and moved on, USNRET's idea would also work great. Pesky electrons:unsure:

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24 minutes ago, dtel said:

You must have spoiled your electrons, hate when that happens. 

 

I have had the same problem with a wire being a little shorter than expected. I just added another piece, soldered it together, a little tape and moved on, USNRET's idea would also work great. Pesky electrons:unsure:

But we determined in that case you wired the additional piece in backwards.

 

Did you ever fix that problem?

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Yeah electrons are a pain.  I think they have ADHD.  Always running around.  Way back when I was an astronomy major in college (I changed), my area of interest was light, which is both a particle and a wave at the same time.  To keep things straight, I often thought about photons as animate objects.  It made more sense to me with obstacles and refraction. 

 

Although speakers have not changed drastically over the last few decades, the way that we manage them sure has.  The signals we send now are enormously complex, and I have the greatest respect for the people  who figure out how to translate a theory into a working process with all the modifications we do.

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One of the fun things about human perception is that if you think there's a problem, then you will experience a problem - regardless of what the physical world is doing (or not doing) around you.

 

The mere fact that you're asking the question means you probably have this nagging thought in the back of your mind. If money isn't tight for you, then I'd recommend pulling a new wire so you don't have to doubt the influence of your interconnect. If money is tight, then rest assured that a good connection won't have any audible impact.

 

We could get into a technical discussion about why it doesn't matter - or ways that it might matter, but that takes an electrical engineering degree and several years of experience dealing with circuits where the wire shape/size actually matters, or galvanic potentials, or oxidation layers, etc.....these are all very well understood fields with all sorts of maths that predict with incredible accuracy the kinds of impacts you might expect. At audio frequencies, you're going to see more influence from dust particles in the air interacting with the surface of your loudspeakers. Do you hear all the ticks and pops of those particles bouncing off the diaphragms? I hope that doesn't put another nagging thought in the back of your mind...

 

Seriously, don't worry about it....and go back to tripping out over more exciting things, like the meaning of the color black and whether it's actually a color or not....can you ever truly experience the real color of black when it's the absence of color?

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@dwilawyer I changed to a bunch of things while I was in undergraduate.  French, German, Russian, Anthropology, Physics,and a few others.  I just wanted to lean everything.  And then I figured out that I already had earned a degree in French Language Culture, which had been discontinued my second year in college, but I was grandfathered.  And then it was off to law school.  Everything else was learning more and more about less and less, which does not appeal to me.  I loved law school, and I love being a lawyer. But if I had it to do over again, I might have stuck with astronomy or physics.

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Well said @DrWho.  Fortunately, I don't have problems.  I don't worry or get nervous either.  Too busy having fun.  I love questions like these because I don't know the answers.  Sometimes other people have answered the same questions, and when their answers make sense, I learn something.  If no one else knows or I don't like the answer, then the fun begins.

 

You can be sure that I am going to try every possible subwoofer connection and see what happens. I mean, what would happen if I connected subwoofers as my front speakers?  The PB 12 Plus is related to my PB2 Plus, and it goes to 250 Hz.  The PB 16 Ultra goes to 360 Hz in closed mode.  Would they sound like great speakers or horrible?  If they are horrible speakers, how could they be great subwoofers?  And if they sound great to 250 Hz, then maybe I should set my crossover at 250.  Or maybe instead of a crossover, I should have a merge so both get the same signal. 

 

For me right now, this is a lot more interesting than whether black is a color.  The general answer is no because color is defined as the spectrum that an object radiates or reflects, and blakc objects radiate nothing in the color spectrum (400-700 nm plus or minus).  But if it radiated 300 nm or 900 nm, then it would look black to us, but not to something that could perceive that spectrum.  Some insects see down to 300 nm.  As I recall, there is not much on the long end.  

 

If you really want to wrap your mind around a related question, ask why the Pistol Shrimp has so much better vision that we do.  We are trichromats with three different color receptors in our eyes (red, blue, green).  Pistol shrimp have 12-16.   And their eyes move independently.  And yeah they see light to 300 nm.  They potentially see colors that we don't or see them in different ways.  That would be like someone who would hear sounds that no one else could.  And I hear that pistol shrimp can see black, so it's a color.  I had on in my aquarium for years.  

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4 hours ago, DrWho said:

can you ever truly experience the real color of black when it's the absence of color?

It is an achromatic color.  It absorbs all colors of the light spectrum and reflects none.  This lack of reflection is perceived by the brain as the achromatic color "black."

 

You remember the high school science experiment you had to do right?  Take a piece of white construction paper and one black.  Tape a thermometer to both pieces in a similar location and in a similar fashion.  Put both pieces of paper next to each other and shine a white light on both pieces of paper and record the temprature  of each thermomoter after 1 minute, five minutes, 10 and 30.  Which one is absorbing the most radiant light energy (quanta) and converting into heat energy?

 

He is going to have to contemplate something else now.

 

I would highly recommend the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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21 minutes ago, vasubandu said:

Ha ha @dwilawyer, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Can you even get it now?  My copy is a paperback, and I think I got it in 1985.  As for your theory on the color black, what is the analog for sound?

Very much still in print.  One of the greatest books ever written, on many, many different levels.

 

Acoustics is not my forte, that is why I am on here, to try and learn.  If sound absorption is an analog to light absorption from a science or engineering perspective, then the analog would be sound absorbers like Bass Traps.

 

A photo of Prisig with his son.

 

From Zen, now this is something to for an audio person to contemplate:

 

"Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist."

Prisig.jpg

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You guys are a bunch of nerds....I'm digging it. I intended the black color thing as a joke, but right on.....I learned something new about Pistol Shrimp!

 

How long have you been doing the audio hobby? I can totally relate with your passion for learning everything under the sun. One of the reasons I love audio so much is that there is so much depth to the science, and the impact of that science engages our soul in the most artistic ways.

 

Here are some cool websites I've come across over the years that have facilitated my learning outside the formal confines of college:

https://www.prosoundweb.com/

http://quarter-wave.com/

https://www.klippel.de/know-how/literature/papers.html

http://data-bass.com/home

http://www.rane.com/library.html#gpm1_2

http://www.klipsch.com/dope-from-hope (super cool to see this on the klipsch website now)

http://kolbrek.hoyttalerdesign.no/index.php/publications

 

There have been all sorts of great articles published on the forum too - I just listed a few websites with a ton of articles for you to dive into.

 

Happy reading!

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